Skillet Cornbread

Alternately titled: “One girl’s fight against becoming a football widow”

It is Sunday afternoon. It is late September. There is a pot of chili on my stove. A bunch of guys in my basement. This can only mean one thing: football is back!

Chili and football is pretty synonymous in our house. During the NFL season Derek spends many a Saturday night making a huge pot of chili for Sunday’s football watching. Nowadays friends show up with pots of their own chili to take part in some playful chili cook offs (and to see if they can out-do one another by adding surprising ingredients).

I have decided to embrace this whole phenomenon by contributing to the feast – starting with some good old skillet cornbread!

I have grown to love football, but if you are still struggling with it, cornbread makes everything better! This recipe has green onion, a bit of jalapeno and a good helping of fresh parmesan cheese….mmmmmmm….

MUST be served warm with REAL butter!

When I first met Derek I did not know a single thing about football. Growing up in the rugby crazed South Africa I was surrounded by lots of rugby fans. I could even watch a five day cricket test with the best of them (and like it!). But this football thing was a whole other ballgame… quite literally I suppose…

I quickly realized that football was here to stay. And you know what they say, : “if you can’t beat them, join them”. So I went to work on picking a team for myself. My initial strategy was to pick a team with the nicest uniform. After some extensive Googling I decided on the San Diego (Super) Chargers.

Problem was though, that Derek is a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan – and I would get so caught up in his excitement that I found myself rooting for them too. Throw in a couple of recent Superbowl wins and I am now a Steelers convert (sorry Chargers).

Wanna make your own cornbread?

You will need:

1/4 cup of salted butter

1 cup of green onion

1/2 a jalapeno pepper, without seeds (this was not spicy at all – I may add the whole pepper next time)

1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

2 cups of stone ground cornmeal

1 cup all purpose flour

1/4 cup sugar

2 table spoons of baking powder

pinch of salt

1-1/2 cups buttermilk (I did not have buttermilk, so I just added a tablespoon of white vinegar to the milk and let it stand for 5 minutes)

2 large eggs

How to:

Pre-heat oven at 400F

chop up the green onion and jalapeno pepper (remember to remove the seeds)

Throw the chopped onion and pepper to a skillet on the stove and saute until butter is browned

In a large bowl, sift all the dry ingredients together

In a smaller bowl – mix together the buttermilk (or fake buttermilk in my case!) and eggs

Now mix together the dry mixture, the wet mixture and the sauteed greens (do you like how eloquently I put it?)

Spray the oven pan with non-stick spray and pour the batter into it (I just poured the batter into the skillet that I used to saute the onions and pepper since it was still nice and buttery – just make sure your skillet is oven safe first)

Bake for about 20 minutes or until a knife comes out clean

Served best warm with butter!

Disclaimer: The delicious bowl of chili in the pictures was not made by me, but by our friend Sabine. Thanks dude!